Marketing Communications - Assignment Example

MARKETING COMMUNICATION Content Content 1 Answer 2 3 References 6 Answer 1 In this era of marketing every company manufacturing a product needs to go beyond producing the best quality at the lowest price and reaching it to the right customer at the right point of time. The companies need to communicate with the existing customers and the prospective future customers in order to increase their sales and retain the market share. Thus, each and every company needs to promote their product in a proper way. There is a need for marketing communications that would help the customers become aware of the product. In today’s changing environment of marketing, there is a need for marketing communications since markets have been fragmented and very few companies go for mass marketing. The fragmentation of the media is also taking place (Grunig and Hunt, 1984, p. 36). The development of information transfer and technology improvement has caused this segmentation of each mass market. Hence, it is necessary to target each segment and to reach out to these segments particularly. The main forms of marketing communications include advertisement, public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, and direct marketing (Kotler and Keller, 2006, p. 605). These marketing strategies have to be implemented by a company in a manner of integration so that each of the strategies complements another one. Since nowadays people have an access to all kinds of media in the form of visuals, audio, and the Internet there are loads of ways in which messages come to the customers from varied sources. These messages may be conflicting at times. The various kinds of promotional activities of a number of companies in the same sector can confuse the consumer in a lot of ways. The brand images that are set in the minds of the customers can also be vague. This problem particularly occurs to the functional specialists who handle various forms of communications for marketing that are independent of each other. Though these days the Internet is used as the most popular medium for the exchange of information, it cannot be the sole medium for promoting a brand. There should be a right mix of other forms of communications like the interaction with the customers and traditional forms of branding which need to be blended well to get the final result successfully. The right marketing message has to reach the public, and for that the coordination of all the marketing channels is essential (Stern and El-Ansary, 1995, p. 92). The message that would be transmitted to the customers has to be consistent, clear, and compelling in order to convert. For example, when Coca-Cola wants to launch a new flavour of soft drink that it would like the youth to consume, the company has to devise the marketing communication strategies in such a way that it reaches the youth in the most effective way possible. Thus, the strategists have to go for those kinds of media that the younger generation has the maximum access to like the Internet. The main communication activities have to be done in the colleges and the eateries which this generation visits. Any kind of marketing communication would not be successful unless the managers have the adequate knowledge about the working of the communication process. There are various steps to this. First of all the target audience has to be identified and the basic questions have to be asked regarding the decision making drivers of the target market. There will be two parties of this communication process, the sender and the receiver. It has to be decided how and where the message will be communicated (Bowersox and Morash, 1989, p. 21). The objective of this kind of communication has to be understood and the message will have to be designed accordingly. Generally the AIDA models are used for this purpose. Each of these communication messages should have an emotional, rational, and/or moral appeal to touch the minds of the customers. Thus, communication these days is looked into as a management of the process in which the customer makes a decision to buy till the actual purchase over a time period. Answer 2 After the managers have fixed the marketing communication strategies it is necessary for them to decide on the Total Promotional Budget. This is so because the marketing activities are undertaken simply for increasing the sales of the products of a company and hence a part of this should be considered as expenditure. That is the cost that will be incurred for increasing the sales of a product. Companies may spend from 10 % to as much as 30% on their advertisement expenditures, but that depends on the sector or the industries of operation. For example, the expenditure is more for FMCG products while it is much less for industrial products (Clampitt, 2005, p. 72). Most of the companies adopt a particular promotional method for allocating the budget. There are several methods: Affordability Method: This method is taken by the companies when they have already decided on the sales budget, and they feel they would not be able to spend more than this budget. The strength of this method is that there is a very little scope for the companies to overspend on their advertisement and sales promotion activities. The weakness of this method is that it does not consider sales promotion as a form of investment and ignores the impact it has on the net volume of sales. Percentage-of-Sales Method: This method considers communication expenditures as a percentage of their expected sales, hence, as the sales go up the budget is also flexible enough to increase with the sales. The strength of this method is that it poses an advantage for the managers to calculate the forecast for the next season and to see this kind of expenditure as a function of sales. Thus, expenditures per unit can also be calculated easily. This also provides stability in the competition with the other players and can get an estimate of how much other players are spending on marketing communications (McCarthy, 1960, p. 42). The weakness of this method is that it considers communication expenditure as a function of sales rather than communication that ultimately results in sales. Competitive-Parity Method: Using this method, the companies set their budget as per the budget fixed by other competitors in the market and accordingly adjust their own. The strength of this method is that since most of the companies fix their budget on the basis of what the others are doing the overall atmosphere of the industry spending trends can be understood, and, hence, the company would not overspend on their expenditures. The weakness of this method is that it does not give a clear idea to the managers how much they should spend, and the industry figures are not always the true reflectors of the company (Ray, 1982, p. 135). Further, the expenditure needs vary from company to company. Objective-and-Task Method: In this method particular sets of objectives are done by the marketers, and the costs that would be required to carry out those tasks are determined. These costs are aggregated to arrive at the total budget that is necessary for promotion. The strength of this method is that it is the most practical, but the disadvantage is that the managers will have a tendency to overspend using this method of promotion. However, for carrying out all these kinds of promotional activities certain things have to be ensured (Goldhaber, 1986, p. 123). Both the internal and external trends of the sales of the company products have to be done. The communication spending needs to be audited very well to avoid any kind of misspending. The elements of communication have to be compatible to one another, and performance measures have to be created for a thorough scrutiny of the entire process. References Bowersox, D. and Morash, E., 1989. The integration of marketing flows in channels of distribution. European Journal of Marketing, 23(2), pp. 58-67. Clampitt, P., 2005. Communicating for managerial effectiveness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Goldhaber, G.M., 1986. Organisational communication. Dubuque, IA: W.C. Brown. Grunig, J. E. and Hunt, T., 1984. Managing public relations. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers. Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L., 2006. Marketing management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. McCarthy, E.J., 1960. Basic marketing: a managerial approach. Homewood, IL: Irwin. Ray, M.L., 1982. Advertisement and communications management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Stern, L. and El-Ansary, A., 1995. Marketing channels. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Read More